There will never be a more justifiable use of the
ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The Founding Fathers created the
Electoral College because they were actually
“afraid of direct democracy,” according to
FactCheck.org .

As James Madison put it, that
“factions” of citizens with a common interest don’t harm
the nation as a whole. Madison’s fear – was “the
tyranny of the majority” – that a faction could grow to encompass more
than 50 percent of the population, at which point it could
"sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights
of other citizens.”

In fact, Alexander Hamilton thought the electors
would make sure that
“the office of president will never fall to the lot of
any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite
qualifications.”

REASON ENOUGH:-
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated that
over the next decade Trump's Tax Plan would
cut Federal Revenues by $6.2
trillion and
increase the Federal Debt by
$5.3 trillion !
AND
Trump, not just denying Global Warming, but lying
that its a Chinese Hoax !
-- when the vast majority of scientists and 194 Countries know its a world
crisis.

Richard Painter, Chief Ethics Counsel
for George W. Bush, and Norman Eisen,
Chief Ethics Counsel for Barack Obama, believe
that if Trump continues to retain ownership over
his global business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19,
they should reject him.

As Eisen explains, “the founders did
not want any foreign payments to the president. Period.” This principle is
enshrined in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution,
which bars office holders from accepting
“any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any
king, prince, or foreign state.” The provision was created to prevent the
President from being corrupted by foreign influences.

Painter agrees. “I don’t think the Electoral College
can vote for someone to become president if he’s going to be in violation
of the Constitution on day one and hasn’t
assured us he’s not in violation.” Painter says his attempts to warn the
Trump transition of the legal consequences of
Trump’s continued ownership of his business interests are being ignored.

Trump doesn’t release his tax returns. He won’t put his foreign business
holdings into a blind trust. His
children sit in on private meetings with
foreign leaders. If the 538 Electors vote for Trump on December 19, in the
absence of a complete divestment of his business interests, they will abdicate their solemn duties under the Constitution.

The Electoral College can replace Trump by Hillary with only 38
Republican Electors

Hillary Clinton’s decision to
join Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s recount efforts in key
states may have been welcome news to Democrats, but it is unlikely to change the
outcome of the presidential election. Nor will complaining about the unfairness
of the Electoral College.

To become president, a candidate must get a bare majority of 270 votes when
the electoral college meets Dec. 19.

As Alexander Hamilton explained, the
Electoral College provides a backstop in the event
voters select a dangerously unfit candidate. “The process of election,”
Hamilton wrote, “affords a moral certainty that the office of President will
never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with
the requisite qualifications.” Electors would use their judgment to prevent the
“tumult and disorder” that would result from “this mischief” of presidential
candidates exploiting “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of
popularity.”

Election Day produced 306 electors pledged to
Trump and 232 pledged to Clinton.A petition at Change.org asks Republican electors to vote for
Clinton to persuade at
least 38 Republican Electors to vote for Hillary, leaving Trump
with only 268 votes.

If no candidate secures 270 votes, the House of
Representatives selects the next president from the top three
vote-getters in the Electoral College.

Could Electoral College Elect Clinton -- it's a long shot worth taking?

Q: Can the Electoral College elect Hillary Clinton on Dec. 19 ?A:Yes, it may be constitutionally possible; but no,
it will not happen, according to election experts.

FULL ANSWER

A
Change.org petition, now signed by more than 4.3 million people, encourages
members of the Electoral College to cast their votes for Hillary Clinton when
the college meets on Dec. 19. The petition argues that Donald Trump is “unfit to
serve” and that “Secretary Clinton WON THE POPULAR VOTE and should be
President.”

“If they all vote the way their states voted, Donald Trump
will win,” the petition states. “However, they can vote for Hillary Clinton if
they choose. Even in states where that is not allowed, their vote would still be
counted, they would simply pay a small fine – which we can be sure Clinton
supporters will be glad to pay! We are calling on the Electors to ignore their
states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton.”

A number of our readers reached out to us by phone and email
and asked if it was true that members of the Electoral College are not bound to
vote for the candidate who won a majority of votes in their state, and
specifically whether the Electoral College could actually give the presidency to
Clinton over Trump.

Let’s back up a bit and explain how the Electoral College
works, and why — an issue
we addressed in 2008 in an article that has gotten a lot of views recently.

As we explained then, when U.S. citizens go to the polls to
“elect” a president, they are in fact voting for a particular slate of electors.
The electors, selected based on which party’s candidate wins the most votes in a
state, meet in their respective states 41 days after the popular election.
There, they cast a ballot for president and a second for vice president. In
every state but
Maine and Nebraska, the candidate who wins the most votes (that is, a
plurality) in the state is supposed to receive all of the state’s electoral
votes.

Because candidates can win some states by wide margins and
others by a slim one, it is possible for a candidate to win the Electoral
College vote even if he or she loses the national popular vote. Indeed that has
happened
three times in U.S. history, most recently in 2000 when George W. Bush lost
the popular vote by about 540,000 votes to Al Gore, but won the electoral vote,
271 to 266. (Also, in 1824, John Quincy Adams was elected president even though
Andrew Jackson received more popular and electoral votes.)

And the popular vote winner may not be the same as the
electoral winner again this year. Absentee votes are still being counted, but as
of Nov. 15, Clinton was winning the
popular vote tally
by more than 775,000 votes, even as Trump was handily winning the Electoral
College tally.

Why is there an Electoral College? As we wrote in our 2008
story, most of the nation’s founders were actually rather afraid of democracy,
and wanted an extra layer beyond the direct election of the president. As
Alexander Hamilton
writes in “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution is designed to ensure
“that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not
in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The point of
the Electoral College is to preserve “the sense of the people,” while at the
same time ensuring that a president is chosen “by men most capable of analyzing
the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable
to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and
inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”

In modern practice, the Electoral College is mostly a
formality. It is true, as the
National Archives and Records Administration notes, that there is “no
Constitutional provision or
Federal law that requires Electors to vote according to the results of the
popular vote in their states.” But the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled in 1952
that states could require electors to take a pledge to support the
party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees from its national
convention. And many do. Some even prescribe fines of $500 to $1,000 to
so-called “faithless electors” for not voting for the party’s nominee, or allow
them to be replaced by an alternate.

Whether those pledges or fines could be upheld by the Supreme
Court is unclear. As the National Archives notes, “No Elector has ever been
prosecuted for failing to vote as pledged.” In addition, more than 20 states do
not have a state law or party or state pledge requiring electors to back the
candidates with the most votes in their state.

“There is a lot of uncertainty because it is such a scarce
occurrence,” Chris Hughes, a staff attorney at FairVote, a voting-rights advocacy group, told us.

According to
FairVote, there have
been 157 “faithless electors” in the history of the U.S. But even that figure is
deceptively high. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate
died before the Electoral College cast its votes. In all, the group states, “82
electoral votes were changed on the personal initiative of the elector.” None
has affected the outcome of a presidential election.

The most recent example occurred in 2004 when an
anonymous elector from Minnesota, pledged to vote for Democrat John Kerry, cast
a presidential vote instead for Kerry’s running mate, John Edwards, some believe
by mistake. In 2000, a Democratic elector from the District of Columbia declined
to cast her vote “to protest the lack of congressional representation for
Washington, DC,” FairVote notes.

“Presidential Electors are theoretically free to vote as their
consciences dictate, something the founders anticipated Electors would indeed do
under Hamilton’s Electoral College invention,”
Laurence Tribe,
a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, told us via email.

Tribe said the constitutionality of imposing a fine on a
“faithless elector” is “open to doubt, and it is even more doubtful that a court
would compel any Elector to be ‘faithful’ to the State’s winner-take-all
outcome. Nor is it likely that the Vice President, who presides over the process
of opening the Electors’ ballots and counting the votes cast by the 538
Electors, would feel free to ‘correct’ a faithless Elector’s vote. So, in
theory, if enough Electors pledged to Mr. Trump decline to make him
President-elect and vote instead for Secretary Clinton, she would become the
President-elect and would be the 45th President upon taking the Oath of Office
on January 20, 2017.”

But Tribe said such a scenario is highly unlikely as a matter
of practice, in part because it would likely be opposed by President Obama and
Clinton herself.

“In the current situation, where both incumbent President
Obama and the candidate who won a popular majority nationwide, Hillary Clinton,
have made such a huge point of accepting Donald Trump as the President-elect,
and where both Obama and Clinton have repeatedly insisted that such acceptance
is vital to the peaceful transition our democracy requires, I frankly cannot
imagine either of them supporting the proposed move to have the Electoral
College elect the former Secretary of State on December 19,” Tribe said. “And,
without their support, the move seems doomed to fail.”

Indeed, Obama said at a
press conference on Nov. 14, “Look, the people have spoken. Donald Trump
will be the next President, the 45th President of the United States.”

In her
concession speech, Clinton said, “Donald Trump is going to be our president”
and added that Americans “respect and cherish” the “rule of law.”

There is another huge practical hurdle to the
scenario called for in the petition. The electors are chosen by the state
parties. They are usually people heavily involved in the campaign of their
party’s nominee or active in the state party.

“The electors are mostly people connected to the
political party leadership in their states,”
Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University
School of Law, told us via email. “So if you try to picture how this might
happen, it would have to be the party leadership in some
group of states that is convinced to abandon Trump.”

Kermit Roosevelt, professor of law at the University
of Pennsylvania Law School, put it succinctly. He said that while there is “no
clear requirement in the Constitution that electors vote for the candidate
they’re pledged to … it’s very unlikely that defections will happen now.”